Читать книгу Sticky Fingers - Joe Hagan - Страница 13
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California Dreamin’
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time magazine?
—Allen Ginsberg, “America”
The day Jann Wenner strode into the offices of Ramparts magazine in North Beach, he wore a trench coat and sunglasses, a fedora cocked on his head. “He looked like he was from a Dashiell Hammett play or something,” said Linda Kingsbury, the office girl Friday and Wenner’s future sister-in-law. “I just thought, ‘Who is this?’ ”
Wenner’s fortunes began when Ramparts, a monthly founded by left-wing Catholics and edited by an eccentric Irish-Catholic newspaperman named Warren Hinckle, decided to launch a biweekly broadsheet in the fall of 1966 called The Sunday Ramparts. “The idea was to have Sunday Ramparts be irreverent in the style of the Manchester Guardian and the London Times,” Ralph Gleason later explained. “It’ll look very stuffy but in actuality it would be outrageous.”
Gleason, a member of Ramparts’ editorial board, recommended Wenner as an editor and “rock and roll specialist,” and Wenner immediately shelved his novel (which “didn’t reveal any talent,” he concluded) and moved back to San Francisco to help put out the first issue in October 1966.
Before he could start, however, there was a hurdle: He was reclassified as 1-A by the Selective Service System, making him available for the Vietnam draft. In 1966, the number of men sent to fight in Vietnam more than doubled to 385,000. Dr. Sandor Burstein, the Wenner family doctor (and his mother’s ex-lover), declined to help him, so Wenner went to a Dr. Martin Hoffman on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. An advocate for gay rights who wrote the pioneering 1968 book The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil, Hoffman studied gay men around San Francisco and encouraged a “radical tolerance” for homosexuality. To help Wenner avoid the war, he diagnosed him with a “serious personality disorder . . . with its concomitant history of psychiatric treatment, suicidal ideation, homosexual and excessive heterosexual promiscuity, and heavy use of illegal drugs.”
If the letter to the army draft board contained more than a kernel of truth, it also achieved its purpose: Like the rest of his friends in the society scene, Wenner avoided the most divisive and defining event of his generation. He did not know a single person who served in Vietnam. “The poor people went and fought the war,” said Wenner. “No friends of mine died there. No people I went to high school with . . . No people from my college. My group of friends were wealthy enough to avoid the draft or they were 2-S deferred in college.” (Only later did he learn that Bill Belding, class president at Chadwick, had become a Navy SEAL.)
Instead, Wenner would have a front-row seat to the rock-and-roll revolution, witnessing history from a desk at 301 Broadway, surrounded by folk cafés, seedy topless bars, drinking holes for sailors, and beat clubs like the hungry i, the same neighborhood where Ralph Gleason wore out his crepe-soled boots. “Ralph used to take me to Basin Street to see Ray Charles,” recalled Wenner. “It was really at that epicenter of the post-beatnik hippie San Francisco . . . the melting pot of all that.”
The same week Wenner started, a young woman stopped by his office to introduce herself. Jane Schindelheim, the resident “Xerox queen,” sister of the secretary, couldn’t help but notice the brash new editor bopping around like he owned the place. “I overheard Jann telling someone about Chadwick,” recounted Jane. “So I went into his office, and he was reading the Times. He had all these Coca-Cola bottles lined up on the ledge. I said to him, ‘Did you know John Muchmore?’ And he said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘My ex-boyfriend went to Chadwick.’ ”
Wenner brightened. Sure, he knew Muchmore—the only skier at Chadwick who had been better than him, he said. “I guess we’re destined to get married,” he told her, “because I just broke up with somebody.”
A bold young man, she thought. Younger than Wenner by four months and shorter by an inch, Jane was a waifish girl-woman, narrow-hipped and flat-chested, tan-skinned and almond-eyed, with a casual chic gleaned from afternoons roaming Bloomingdale’s as a Manhattan teenager. With her easy sophistication and vaguely Asian features (Wenner said it looked like somebody in her family had been raped by a Mongolian), she was exotic even in 1960s San Francisco. “She wasn’t a hippie,” said Wenner. “She was the Bloomingdale’s girl. Just savvy . . . If she had an overcoat, it would be long, [with] clean lines, much more to the Jackie Onassis style.”
“What I wasn’t used to is the Grateful Dead,” said Jane, “and people calling other people ‘Mountain Girl.’ That I wasn’t used to.”
Schindelheim grew up in Stuyvesant Town, the collection of high-rises along the East Side of New York City, her parents Eastern European Jews. Her father, Arthur, was from Austria-Hungary and wanted to be a lawyer but instead became a dentist because the schooling was quicker and the job more lucrative. Her mother Theresa’s family was from Eastern Europe, but she was born in New York. Both were stiff teetotalers, conservative and remote, providing everything for their daughters but warmth. Domineering and status conscious, Theresa valued beauty and wealth and reminded her daughters, especially Linda, how they failed to measure up on a daily basis. She regarded Jane as a pretty bauble, “the beautiful one,” said her sister, Linda. “And she was aware that that wasn’t something she did; it was something she was born with. And that was a difficult thing.”
Jane found solace in fashion and art, attending the High School of Music and Art in Harlem to study drawing. She wore black turtlenecks, smoked skinny joints, and drew moody portraits in charcoal and pencil evoking her inner torpor. She didn’t smile easily, keeping friends guessing what lay behind her curtain of dark hair, offering her sly humor in small but tantalizing doses. A friend wrote a poem describing her as “plotting and scheming for nothing but the entertainment of it.”
“She was always in a trench coat,” recalled Peter Wolf, a classmate who later became the lead singer for the J. Geils Band. “Just reminded me of some babe that would have walked off a Godard movie. And she always wore the same black turtleneck, and these sandal shoes, she was quite stunning. Eyesight to the blind, as one might say. Just had an aura about her.”
After graduating, Jane moved to Pittsburgh to study line drawing at Carnegie Tech. On her first day, she met the quietly handsome painter from California John Muchmore, and a heated romance ensued. Art drew them together. “She had an incredible line,” Muchmore said of her drawing. “Speaking as a painter, there was an energy to it. It wasn’t an even line. There was a pulse to it. An emotion to her line. So that her line drawings were very dynamic, very alive.”
After a year and a half, Muchmore became disenchanted with school, they broke up, and a distraught Jane dropped out and flew west to visit her sister, Linda, who had moved to San Francisco. Jane figured she’d go back in two weeks.
While Wenner poured himself into his new job at The Sunday Ramparts, he enjoyed the company of the nice Jewish girl whose poise seemed a cut above, a sophisticated New Yorker who dismissed the fuzzy Bay Area hippiedom with a casual eye roll and regarded Wenner as the diamond in the local rough. After a few dates, Jann and Jane moved in together, mainly because Wenner needed a roommate to pay the rent at his mother’s house. They began sleeping together, but neither was ready to commit. “It wasn’t falling madly in love,” Wenner said. “It wasn’t love at first sight . . . I wanted a stable relationship, something to go home to.”
They agreed they could see other people at first. “You can be free to do what you want; I’ll do what I want,” he recalled telling her. “We’re not going to get that serious. [But] we were still fucking in the house.”
Jane was both charmed and flummoxed by Wenner. He was in perpetual haste, but when he slowed down enough to pay attention to her, it opened her like a flower. “I remember one time he was running; he came to pick me up and was late from the plane,” said Jane. “He had just bought this cake in the shape of a heart. That’s when I think my feelings for him changed. He had a buttoned-up shirt over blue jeans. It was endearing.”
But then off again he went.
•
AT THE SUNDAY RAMPARTS, Wenner wrote capsule reviews for the local film and theater listings, with a roving eye for the drug and sex flicks bubbling up from the underground, like the LSD exploitation film Hallucination Generation (“predictable, inaccurate”) or Underground Cinema 12, “a potpourri of sexual revelry about an orgy, an intimate look at heterosexual stuff, a surrealistic glance or two and a ‘sensitive’ leer at homosexuality.”
Typical was his review of the 1965 film Sexus: “The plot is a bore, but it contains a good sado-masochistic lesbian bit. Only for a joke at the Presidio.”
For the rock listings, however, Wenner lavished wholly uncritical praise on the local scene like the junior-league Ralph Gleason that he was. Wenner touted San Francisco as having “two of the five or six top rock groups in the country.” Local hero Steve Miller created “a musical ecstasy unusual in a blues group,” and the Jefferson Airplane were “distinguished by an unusually professional manner, excellent original material and a unique tenor-alto sound.” What he lacked in insight, he made up for with enthusiastic accessibility. While his Berkeley classmate Jonathan Cott, also at The Sunday Ramparts, was writing sophisticated criticism of avant-garde cinema (“Nowhere Man: A Clarification with Seven Propositions” was his review of Blow-Up), Wenner was glossing the revolution for the squares: Rock and roll, Wenner informed readers, was “noted for its heavy rhythms, pounding beat and loudness of approach, or, in a word, its sexuality.” He named “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones the best rock-and-roll song “ever done,” though, he emphasized, the Beatles were the greatest band, and Dylan the greatest lyricist. His simple idea was already in evidence. “If [the songs] are about drugs, and more and more of them are, then that’s what’s happening with this generation,” he wrote. “Rock and roll speaks for today’s experiences. It is the poetry of youth.”
Wenner interviewed Muddy Waters, who told Wenner that his favorite white rock-and-roll band was the Stones. “You know their name comes from a song I wrote,” Waters said.
For new arrivals on the scene, Wenner was the travel guide to the renaissance in his backyard:
Five to ten huge dance concerts take place every weekend, not just indoors, but often on the beaches and mountains. In addition, the big name tours, East Bay drag strip discotheques and smaller high school oriented shows flourish. This city loves that sound . . .
. . . Avant-garde theater has been presented. Poster art comparable to that of Paris in the twenties has been nourished (one Family Dog poster bore the credo: “May the Baby Jesus Open Your Mind and Shut Your Mouth”).
Wenner reserved his critical swipes for out-of-towners. Folksinger Tom Paxton of Chicago “left a feeling of pretentiousness much like Paul Simon’s ‘poetry.’ ” Wenner drove to Los Angeles for the express purpose of sniffing at the rival scene, disparaging the bands, mocking their clothes, and deriding their fraudulent fans (“two short haired boys in Macy’s mod”). The two best L.A. groups, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Iron Butterfly, paled in comparison to any San Francisco band, he wrote, quoting Ellen Harmon, a co-founder of the Family Dog, calling L.A. “super uptight plastic America.”
Meanwhile, his review of hometown favorites the Grateful Dead was so reverent Warner Bros. used it as a promotional tear sheet to sell the album. His article noted that Bob Weir was “from a social Atherton family” and that his jug band “played for his sister’s debutante party this summer”; “noted jazz critic” Ralph Gleason had named Pigpen McKernan “one of the major bluesmen in America.” “My tastes, and my music, were pretty mainstream,” Wenner said. “I wasn’t raised listening to the blues . . . I was not a deep musical person. I was a fan, and it spread out from there.”
But San Francisco was no longer a secret beyond the Sierras. As boldfaced names of the youth revolution, like Tim Leary and Joan Baez, came to sample the scene, Wenner received them like a local diplomat. Wenner had worshipped Leary as a righteous advocate of his favorite drug and was disappointed when he only wanted to eat a hamburger and drink beer in a bar. Wenner wrote a positive article nonetheless, titled “The Case for Dr. Leary.”
In truth, Wenner was as interested in Leary’s star power as in the content of his propaganda. After he met Joan Baez for lunch, getting her view on the rock revolution (she was ambivalent), he paraded her through the Ramparts offices to enjoy the effect of her celebrity. “I just remember everybody in the office gawked,” said Wenner. “I was interested in watching the reaction of everybody. It lifted my stock.”
Inside the Ramparts offices, Wenner kept his eye trained on Warren Hinckle, in whose profile Wenner could see an outline of his own future. A bon vivant and socialite, and heavy drinker, who wore expensive haberdashery and reveled in self-promotion, Hinckle made his name as a young journalist teasing a gay Chronicle columnist, “Count Marco,” revealing that he’d been a hairdresser and hung out around public restrooms. Willfully eccentric, Hinckle owned a pet capuchin monkey named Henry Luce and wore an eye patch over one eye (lost in a childhood car accident). Hinckle was a gifted provocateur, drawing attention to Ramparts with searing covers like the image of a crucified Jesus Christ planted in a Vietnam battlefield. The magazine raked as much muck as possible, capturing the left-wing political tumult of mid-1960s San Francisco by hiring Eldridge Cleaver, a confessed rapist who was politically radicalized in a California prison and became a leader of the Black Panther Party, as a columnist. But Hinckle’s main passion was controversy. For a feature on Hugh Hefner, Hinckle included a centerfold of Hefner smoking a pipe. The magazine was famously said to have “A Bomb in Every Issue,” and Wenner watched, in early 1967, as Ramparts detonated the biggest bomb in its history: a story on the infiltration of student groups across the country by the Central Intelligence Agency, which ended up exposing, among others, pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem and her front work while a student at Harvard. As Hinckle muscled the story toward publication, the CIA tried to counter the report before Ramparts could print, but Hinckle beat it to the punch by taking out a one-page ad in The New York Times to break the story. The magazine’s circulation doubled. Wenner clipped out newspaper stories about it and filed them away. “He transformed the magazine from a lefty, radical, Catholic magazine to a much more commercial, broader, muckraking publication,” said Wenner. “It was a breakthrough magazine of its time. And in addition to the tough political, cultural writing, it was elegant . . . The mix was highly unusual. And that mix moved into Rolling Stone.”
But a cultural divide now separated Hinckle’s older twentysomethings, who drank liquor and aspired to New Left discourse, from Wenner’s generation of younger twentysomethings, who smoked dope, wore denim, and embraced Bob Dylan. In truth, Wenner might have gone either way. He was devoted to rock and roll but was turned off by the hippie hair balls mobbing the Haight-Ashbury. After visiting Ken Kesey’s ranch in La Honda with Warnecke, Wenner published a bracingly skeptical review of Kesey, who he felt had corrupted his would-be paramour, Denise Kaufman. He quoted at length a “noted writer in the Scene”—really just Wenner himself—criticizing Kesey as being on a “Christ Trip.” Quoting himself “was a way of having an opinion but also doing objective journalism,” Wenner said.
In early 1967, Warren Hinckle asked Ralph Gleason, the resident expert on the young, to write an essay on the hippies for Ramparts magazine. But without consulting Gleason, Hinckle decided to write and publish his own feature called “The Social History of the Hippies,” which argued that they were lotus-eaters who avoided the difficult work of stewarding political change. (He later wrote in his memoir that he was sorry that he “dumped on [Gleason’s] flower children without giving him a chance to defend the little fascists.”)
Wenner might have agreed with Hinckle about hippies, but Gleason was so furious at the betrayal that he immediately resigned from the board of Ramparts and refused to set foot in the offices again. Wenner wasn’t getting much love from Hinckle either: “Wenner was considerably frustrated by my oafish refusal to print his dope and rock stories in the magazine,” Hinckle later wrote, “as I considered rock reporting as a state of the journalistic art on a level with Bengay ads.”
And just as Hinckle and Ramparts pivoted away from Gleason and the counterculture, the magazine pulled the plug on its Sunday newspaper, leaving Jann Wenner without a job. Wenner and Gleason watched in dismay as the best outlet for journalism on the local counterculture disappeared. “Had it lasted a little longer,” Gleason later said, “it would have been the biggest of all the underground papers.”
•
“THE SUMMER OF LOVE” began as a marketing slogan, coined in the spring of 1967 by a consortium of San Francisco heads calling themselves the Council for the Summer of Love. The group - cofounded by Chet Helms, an impresario and band manager who was central to the San Francisco Sound (among other accomplishments, he'd helped discover Janis Joplin) - promised a utopian reboot of the Haight-Ashbury, but they quickly lost control of the phrase when it was adopted by the eastern media as it prepared to descend on the Bay Area for a rock-and-roll event: the Monterey International Pop Festival.
The festival was planned, essentially, as a loss leader, fusing the values of the emergent counterculture with the marketing needs of the big record companies by creating a rock version of the Human Be-In, San Francisco’s “gathering of the tribes” that telegraphed the concept of the hippie around the world. The architect Lou Adler, whose Dunhill Records was enriched by the success of the Mamas and the Papas, saw a chance for a major media event to showcase rock bands for the nascent industry. He struck a $400,000 deal with ABC-TV to finance and film the festival and he conscripted D. A. Pennebaker, who shot the vérité Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back in 1965, to film it. To promote the event, Adler produced a song written by John Phillips called “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Sung by Scott McKenzie, it became a No. 1 hit for Columbia Records on the eve of the festival. (“We all hated that song,” said Wenner. “Hated it, hated it, hated it.”)
While not altogether opposed to being sold, the San Francisco crowd was suspicious of those who were doing the selling. Ralph Gleason was the resident gatekeeper. To gain his support, the L.A. consortium needed to prove it wasn’t out to exploit the psychedelic Eden for money and promise to showcase homegrown stars, especially Big Brother and the Holding Company, led by singer Janis Joplin. “I think we felt we were all in the center of something special,” said Wenner. “As casual and informal and irresponsible as it was, it had a higher purpose. The LSD thing, the power of music. It was evangelical, in many ways. And I think that same impulse was there throughout the rock community. The Beatles felt it; the L.A. groups felt it. We were kind of purists. But San Francisco was seen as the epicenter of it all.”
To broker peace, Adler and his business partner dispatched Derek Taylor, a waggish Brit who worked on and off as the press secretary for the Beatles. He argued that people would intuitively respect any event they paid money to get into. “Had it been free,” recalled Bob Neuwirth, a friend of Bob Dylan’s who was a consultant on the Pennebaker film, “you would have had every meatball in the Western Hemisphere.” Here was a novel idea: putting up a fence and charging money for entrance to the great rock-and-roll love-in to give it credibility.
Wenner himself was a kind of junior broker of the deal. In a memoir published by Wenner in 1973, Derek Taylor would recall that most of the San Francisco people were skeptical of Adler and the hustlers from “the land of tinsel, false idols and broken promises”—except Jann Wenner, “who was most encouraging and quite (for him) honest.”
Taylor conscripted Wenner as an informal consultant for the Monterey festival, soliciting his advice on converting Gleason and commissioning him to write an essay for the full-color catalog they intended to sell at the County Fairgrounds in Monterey. To overcome Gleason’s resistance, Wenner recommended the festival promoters donate the profits to a well-selected charity. When Taylor suggested a rock-and-roll scholarship, Wenner unleashed a kind of manifesto about the meaning of the new culture. “It is a feeling, not skill, that makes the musician or writer,” he wrote in a letter, “and the genesis of rock and roll is being young in the twentieth century.
“You have to think about what rock and roll is all about and decide from there,” he continued, suggesting the “most obvious” cause was the legalization of marijuana. “The next best thing is aid to Vietnam,” he wrote. (They didn’t take his advice.)
As a postscript, Wenner threw in a little request: Could Taylor please send him free copies of all the Beach Boys records?
•
THE FIRST AMERICAN rock-and-roll magazine was invented in 1966 by an earnest Swarthmore College freshman named Paul Williams. Crawdaddy! was named for the club where the Rolling Stones first played, and the magazine—a mimeographed, collated sheet—billed itself as a nofrills publication of “rock and roll criticism” featuring “intelligent writing about pop music.” From his perch on Broadway in San Francisco, Wenner noticed Crawdaddy! right away—and attacked it. In The Sunday Ramparts, he said the danger to the purity of rock and roll was “academics,” citing a pretentious review of a Supremes record in Crawdaddy! as “completely contrary to the spirit of rock and roll. Unfortunately, some people take it seriously.”
“Don’t believe anything you read about rock and roll,” Wenner wrote, “only what you see coming out of amplifiers.”
But the idea for a West Coast rock magazine was already in the air, and Wenner was paying close attention. In San Francisco, two high school friends started a paper called the Mojo Navigator Rock & Roll News in August 1966. Wenner invited the editor, Greg Shaw, to the Ramparts offices to rap about rock music. That same spring, Wenner was approached by Chet Helms, who told Wenner he was germinating a hippie music magazine for distribution in record stores. To get started, Helms had a few hundred names and addresses for contestants in a radio contest put on by KFRC-FM, which would be the initial mailing list for the magazine. Helms also had a clever name for it: Straight Arrow. He asked Jann Wenner to be the editor.
While Helms went looking for money to launch Straight Arrow—he calculated a $200,000 budget—Wenner spent his afternoons looking for work, taking the civil service exam to apply to be a postal carrier, a popular hippie job, while writing a review of Sgt. Pepper’s for High Fidelity. At one point, he was offered a position at Rogers & Cowan, the publicity firm, but turned it down, hoping for something related to rock and roll. He rummaged through Ralph Gleason’s filing cabinets of newspaper and magazine clippings to put together proposals for both an anthology of rock criticism and a rock-and-roll encyclopedia. “It had to be something he would endorse,” recalled Wenner. His pitch for a rock anthology was rejected by an editor in New York.
Maybe the best job was right under Jann Wenner’s nose. He went to meetings with Chet Helms and drew up a prospectus and an organizational chart for Straight Arrow, which included the art director from the Oracle, Gabe Katz. At one point, the group talked of making a magazine shaped like an LP cover. “Since I was the guy who wrote for Ramparts, I was the one designated to put it together,” said Wenner, “and the first beginnings of [Rolling Stone] stemmed from that . . . The notion of doing a rock magazine came square from that.”
Wenner told a friend that the Chet Helms magazine “fell through because of the inability to get funds.” But Helms came to believe Wenner had slunk away with his idea—as well as his list of radio contestants, which Wenner would use to solicit subscriptions and conduct a reader survey for the first issue of Rolling Stone. Wenner acknowledged that Helms felt betrayed, but “no one knew what they were doing. I knew virtually nothing, and they knew less.”
“They were hippies,” reasoned Jane Wenner. “They were supposed to raise the money, and they were just dragging their feet. You know? It was, like, never going anywhere.”
Sometime in the spring of 1967, Wenner drove to Ralph Gleason’s house on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley, plunked himself down in the study, and popped the idea. “Jann came over one day and said, ‘How about a magazine?’ ” recounted Gleason. “Like the Melody Maker and the Musical Express, but an American one that would be different and better and would cover not just the records and the music but would cover the whole culture.
“And instantly that was the idea,” Gleason said, “as soon as he said it we both agreed it was a hell of an idea. And that was it.”
•
WHEN THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL opened in June, Jann Wenner arrived as both a consultant to the festival’s PR man, Derek Taylor, and the would-be editor of a rock-and-roll magazine. He had written an essay for the festival’s full-color catalog called “Rock & Roll Music,” wherein he proclaimed that “rock and roll music has turned out to be more than just noise” and went on to make a case for its cultural ascendance. The public, he wrote, was coming around to the realization that this music was about ambition. “Brian Wilson spent 90 hours in the studio making ‘Good Vibrations,’ ” he wrote. The Beatles were, “dare I say it, geniuses.”
More than fifty thousand people showed up in Monterey to see the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas from Los Angeles; Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel from New York; the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience from London. Local favorites the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane—along with Janis Joplin, whom Ralph Gleason had helped book, and the Steve Miller Blues Band, for whom Wenner advocated—played alongside Otis Redding from Memphis and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. Taylor, who called the festival the “most outrageously ambitious event in the history of popular music,” arranged a massive press pool, issuing a thousand press badges to reporters and photographers from the mainstream outlets of the East, including Newsweek, The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Esquire, plus every obscure underground paper in existence, “a flurry of hair and bearded and beaded literate hippies from Haight-Ashbury and Sunset Strip,” as Taylor recalled. D. A. Pennebaker recorded the proceedings on 16-millimeter film. The last issue of Mojo Navigator, which ran out of money, reported that press cameras crackled throughout Ravi Shankar’s set. The press area was so far beyond capacity Taylor likened it to “Buchenwald”; he was forced to issue new press passes to winnow the crowd the next day. “When John [Phillips] and I showed up on Friday morning,” said Lou Adler, “the amount of worldwide and domestic press was unbelievable. A lot of it had to do with Derek Taylor and how he put it out there. That was the breakthrough.”
As had been the fashion in the smaller world of San Francisco, Monterey was meant to be a microcosm of the whole culture. Outside the fairgrounds, hippies set up makeshift encampments that looked to Wenner more like “a medieval fair or an Indian religious holiday than a show. People camped out at night, danced until early morning on beaches . . . It is the music in which they find spiritual community.” Inside, Wenner roamed backstage in his monogrammed Oxford and jeans, a Nikon camera looped around his neck, snapping pictures, including a shot of Brian Jones, whom he’d last seen emerging from a Rolls-Royce in London. Wenner summoned Jane to Monterey on the third day, and they slept in a house with the band Blue Cheer, friends of John Warnecke’s. Jane shadowed him while he met Hendrix, and they sat near Brian Jones and Nico to watch Janis Joplin. “I was the girlfriend,” said Jane.
Wenner the budding tastemaker studiously scribbled reviews in his notebook. His favorite guitar player was Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band, whom he called “superb,” while Jimi Hendrix “lacks vocal style or smoothness, handles his guitar with agility and with minor drama; although not a master, his art is in his presence.” (After Hendrix pretended to jack off with his guitar and then set it on fire during his epic performance of “Wild Thing,” ABC chose not to air Pennebaker’s film.) And Wenner continued to be unimpressed with Paul Simon, opining that his “primary talent is on the guitar and composing melodies for that instrument; he is not a lyricist.” In his personal notes, Wenner lamented the absence of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and “the sine qua non of pop, the Beatles.” “The festival was less than a complete artistic success,” he wrote. “Poor judgment was the rule in the invitations to some artists and not to others.”
His unpublished critiques notwithstanding, the festival was a watershed moment. As Mike Bloomfield told the crowd, according to a glowing press release Wenner helped draft with Derek Taylor, “This is our generation, we’re all here together, to dig ourselves.”
By the end of the weekend, Clive Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer who was taking over CBS Records, had traded his white tennis sweater for an open-collared shirt and beads. He signed Janis Joplin and her band for an unheard-of $250,000.
•
THE MONTH AFTER the Monterey Pop Festival, a nineteen-year-old Welshman named Robin Gracey made his way to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus, rucksack on his shoulder, proverbial flower in his hair. The winsome lad wanted to experience this “Summer of Love” he’d been reading about in the papers, the siren song of the Doors’ No. 1 hit “Light My Fire” curling through his imagination like hashish smoke.
Gracey had the easy manner of a naïf from the English countryside, oblivious to his own handsome looks, the casual mop of black hair, thick eyebrows, and easy smile. He met a beautiful Swiss woman on a stop in Winnipeg, Canada, and she gave him her number in San Francisco. When he settled in the Haight-Ashbury a week later, the woman invited him to a party north of the city, along the Russian River. It was the summer home of a prominent young man named John Warnecke. The woman, it turned out, was a nanny working for Jackie Kennedy, responsible for taking care of John junior and Caroline, ages six and nine. The senior Warnecke had an affair with the late president’s widow, and her watercolor paintings now graced the walls of the Warnecke home—the same house where members of the Grateful Dead were showing up on a semi-regular basis to take drugs with the architect’s wayward son. (“Phil the bass player roled [sic] a joint in a canoe while going down the river with the wind blowing,” Warnecke wrote to Wenner in 1966.)
That day, Gracey and the nanny went canoeing on the river and returned to find two of Warnecke’s friends hanging out: Jann Wenner and Jane Schindelheim. Recalled Gracey, “We were both swimming in the river below the house, almost certainly naked, and Jann was very ebullient and cheerful.” Charmed by the nude young man with the British accent—who looked a little like Wenner and stood the same height, five six—Wenner invited Gracey to dinner in Potrero Hill the following week, where Jane’s sister, Linda, was now living with them on Rhode Island Street. Jann and Jane were now a steady item. After Jane brought home a handsome doctor one night, Wenner became jealous and asked her to see him exclusively (it would not be the last time Jane used other men to try to get Wenner’s attention). The relationship ran hot and cold, with Jane frustrated by Wenner’s fickle desires and perpetual distraction. “Something tells me that your wants will always be three thousand miles away,” she told him.
In truth, his wants were much closer. Wenner offered himself as Robin Gracey’s all-access pass to the city. “He was my opportunity to go into Golden Gate Park, or see the Grateful Dead, or go to the Fillmore, and I saw Jim Morrison and the Doors,” recounted Gracey.
Gracey wasn’t gay, but Wenner’s enthusiastic seduction seemed part of the woozy spectacle of San Francisco in 1967. At one point, Wenner stole a kiss behind a bush. “He was wooing me,” said Gracey. “I felt on the one hand beguiled by it, charmed, and also somewhat frightened by it, I think. I think I probably lived under the philosophy that, you know, everything is experience.” One afternoon, Wenner asked Gracey if he wanted to try LSD. “I have no idea how many hours we were actually high,” Gracey said. “And I can remember being reluctant during this time, but knowing that, in a sense, I was actually in the vortex. A whirlpool, basically, and that it was going to happen. And it did.”
They had sex at the Wenners’ apartment in Potrero Hill, after which Wenner, on top of the world, took Gracey on a drive in his blue VW Beetle. “His driving on LSD seems a bit frightening,” said Gracey. “I remember seeing visions of cars turning into sharks.”
To that point, Wenner had had only tentative and unsatisfying flirtations with homosexuality. His tryst with Warnecke had been illicit and unformed, a happy accident on LSD. Despite the new age of freedom and self-expression, gay love was not part of the rock-and-roll menu, where “chicks” were the subject of 99 percent of the music. It was still taboo in the male-dominated hippie culture, too. Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising featured gay bikers revving to the sound of Martha and the Vandellas and Mick Jagger preened like a drag queen, but it was part of the Shock of the New, theatrical titillation and subversion rather than a license for open liberation. But for Wenner, the Gracey affair was something deeper than a mere fling: He said it was his first bona fide homosexual romance. On the eve of the invention of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner’s Summer of Love was sanctified by a man.
But then there was Jane, his girlfriend. Her prettiness and sophistication—and her gender—were everything Wenner desired, in theory if not in actuality. She was the nice Jewish girl of his dreams, a cosmopolitan tastemaker to help articulate his ambitions, which, like Jane herself, were directed east. To keep faith with her would require secrets, a conception of truth and loyalty as fungible as Wenner’s own sexuality. But Wenner was a natural at holding two conflicting realities apart, the compartments of his psyche as formalized as between the editor and the publisher of a newspaper. What was it his mother had written? Janus. Two-headed.
In late July, Gracey’s head was still swimming from his LSD trip, his emotional life in turmoil as he prepared to return to England. While in San Francisco, he’d slept with two women and a man—including Jane’s sister, Linda. Before he departed, Wenner drove to Haight-Ashbury to give Gracey a stack of rock LPs and a love letter he’d written. In it, Wenner dubbed them “water brothers,” commemorating their nude swim with a reference to the polyamorous rite in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 sci-fi book, Stranger in a Strange Land (a rite Wenner described in his rave review in The Sunday Ramparts as an “inter-personal baptism”). Wenner ended the letter with a lyric from a Bob Dylan song. It was a familiar line about a lost illusion—and a theft: “Ain’t it hard when you discover that he really wasn’t where it’s at,” he wrote, “after he took from you everything he could steal—how does it feel?”
•
HE NEEDED A NAME for his newspaper.
Jann Wenner had spent the summer of 1967 tossing around potential titles with Ralph Gleason, and for a while they settled on one: New Times. It was almost right, but not quite. Wenner proposed another: The Electric Newspaper. Gleason eyed his young charge and drew on his pipe.
That summer, Gleason was drafting an essay for The American Scholar that summed up his grandest ideas about the revolutionary impact of rock and roll. He quoted Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and opened with a quotation from Plato: “Forms and rhythms in music are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.”
The Beatles, he declared, were the genesis of a new age. Along with Dylan, that “tiny demon of a poet,” the Dionysian energy of rock was destroying the old social forms and inventing a new value system around “the sacred importance of love and truth and beauty and interpersonal relationships.” “They came at the proper moment of a spiritual cusp, as the Martian in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land calls a crisis,” he wrote. “This was, truly, a new generation—the first in America raised with music constantly in its ear, weaned on a transistor radio, involved with songs from its earliest moment of memory.”
After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, he wrote, the record business “took another look at the music of the ponytail and chewing gum set, as Mitch Miller once called the teenage market, and realized there was one helluva lot of bread to be made there.”
He titled the article “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Rolling Stone! The nature of youth, gathering no moss. A Muddy Waters song, an age-old reference from the Bible. There was a popular band with that name and the six-minute radio hit by the generation’s tiny demon. (Inspired by Gleason, Wenner had tried calling his rejected rock anthology “Like a Rolling Stone: Rock and Roll in the Sixties.”)
Gleason blew out a little smoke: “How about Rolling Stone?”
